Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, said that a house divided cannot stand. Does the same now apply to the Grand Old Party? Atlantic Unbound has invited The Atlantic's Jack Beatty and a panel of distinguished commentators to take up this question

Four years after winning control of the House for the first time in forty
years, the Republican Party is obsolescent. That's the argument made by
Christopher Caldwell, a senior writer at The Weekly Standard, in The
Atlantic Monthly's June cover story, "The Southern Captivity of the GOP."
Charting the party's loss of long-time Republican issues to the hardly robust
Democrats, Caldwell points to a 1997 Washington Post poll in which
voters trusted the Democrats more to handle the economy,
balance the budget, deal with crime, and, incredibly, hold down taxes. Caldwell
calls the issues remaining for the Republicans to run on in the fall elections
a "grab bag ... dredged up from 1988: school choice, the Strategic Defense
Initiative, tort reform, abortion. Worthy issues all, but none of them capable
of winning elections."

Host: Jack Beatty
A senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly, Beatty is the
author of The World According to Peter Drucker (1997) and The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley (1992).

Christopher Caldwell
A senior writer for The Weekly Standard, Caldwell also writes a weekly Washington column for the New York Press. His articles have appeared in The American Spectator, Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, George, and many other publications.

Stanley B. Greenberg
Greenberg, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Greenberg Research, has served as polling advisor to President Bill Clinton, President Nelson Mandela, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and their national campaigns.

Terence P. Jeffrey
The editor of Human Events, Jeffrey served as presidential- campaign manager for Patrick J. Buchanan in 1996.

Grover Norquist
The president of Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist is a close advisor to the Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.

The Republican "revolution" of 1994, Caldwell writes, swiftly lost momentum.
The new Congressional majority alienated swing voters with their willingness to
shut down the government. Worse, even in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City
bombing the Republicans were visibly eager to please the National Rifle
Association, making the GOP appear soft on terrorism. Worse yet, in Newt
Gingrich they found themselves saddled with a leader who quickly became the
"one [politician] in American political life less popular than the IRS," to
quote a Clinton-Administration jibe cited by Caldwell. "Under Gingrich's
leadership," Caldwell writes, "the Republicans have not merely replaced the
Democrats of the 1980s; they have become them" -- a party opposed to
campaign-finance reform because it needs PAC contributions and soft money to
fund its newly won "incumbency-protection system." Promising political reform,
the Republican "revolution" left the systemic corruption of the Democratic
status quo undisturbed.

Above all, with its entire House and Senate top leadership drawn from the
South, the GOP has begun to look more and more like a sectional party. This new
southern base, Caldwell argues, hurts the GOP elsewhere in the country (notably
in California, once a key Republican state in presidential elections), because
the "southern morals business" -- the militantly conservative Christianity of
Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and others -- is electoral poison beyond the
southern and mountain states.

Political demography is turning against the GOP. The most recent presidential
election saw young people and Hispanics -- the latter the nation's fastest growing and, Caldwell points out, most strategically situated minority -- voting strongly Democratic, in both cases reversing 1980s trends. In another gloomy indicator for the GOP the 1990 Census revealed that a majority of voters now live in suburbia, making it the new battleground of presidential politics. And Caldwell notes a gathering tension between the suburbs and the South, which were the two props of the GOP presidential victories of the 1980s.

All in all, these trends are worrying for the GOP. So worrying, in fact, that
our first question for our Roundtable guests is, quite simply, Is this party
over? We'd like you to ponder that question in particular -- and, if you see fit, these others:

Is the above demographic survey unduly pessimistic? What are the arguments
against this analysis of political demography?

James Dobson, who claims to have a huge and highly susceptible
following, is the current embodiment of the "southern morals business." What
role is he likely to play in the congressional elections this year? What about
the presidential election in 2000? Why not give us a worst- and a best-case
scenario, from the point of view of the GOP, on Dobson?

The political scientist Martin Wattenberg has found that one predictor of
victory in the general elections of the past thirty years is party unity: the
candidate who most convincingly unifies his party behind him before the general
election has the best chance of victory. Using this logic, which of the
possible GOP contenders in 2000 seems likeliest to unify his party? Give us
some rationales or scenarios on how a candidate might rejuvenate the Reagan
coalition. What issue or issues, in short, can unify Republicans today as the
Cold War and tax cuts unified them yesterday, while also appealing to swing
voters?